(Note: I updated this post later in the day with additional info — and my attached opinions — on Kick becoming free in the next PTR build; thanks, Dalmasca, for noting the Kick change!)
Earlier this week, Ghostcrawler added this to the ongoing “PTR Class and Set Bonus Issues” thread in the WoW PTR Discussion forum:
PvP gloves – changed to increase healing by Recuperate by 1% of health.
As well as this:
Skull Bash costs nothing on the PTR build. Kick too. That may have missed the patch notes.
At the moment (in Patch 5.1), our PvP gloves reduce the energy cost of Kick by 10 (making it free to use). This note appears to say that, in Patch 5.2, the Kick bonus will go away (since it’ll be free regardless), and instead Recuperate will heal an additional 1% of our maximum health per tick — that means 4% per tick (up from 3%), or 40% total (up from 30%) if used at 5 combo points (or 4.5%/45% total if you use the Glyph of Recuperate).
I’ve seen a number of requests in various forums for Recuperate to be buffed in PvP. Does this do the trick? Or does it do little more than turn a trickle of self-healing into a parched stream?
Meanwhile, let’s talk about the Kick change a little more. It’s worth mentioning that this isn’t a Kick-only change; similar tweaks are being made to other classes’ low-cost interrupts. In the same PTR thread, Ghostcrawler wrote this:
In PvE particularly, we think it’s better when players use their utility to help the group at large rather than balking because it’s a personal DPS loss to do so. In PvP, you can make more of an argument that choosing to spend resources on an interrupt or on an attack is an interesting trade-off, but the fact is that many interrupts were already free (or so cheap as to be effectively free).
It’s an interesting — and somewhat discordant — opinion to see from GC, given that we also have abilities like Tricks of the Trade and Feint, which are relatively low in cost and have clear raid benefits, but which rogues often avoid using in raids because it’s a personal DPS loss to do so. Feint, in particular, *was* a zero-energy ability in Cata (when coupled with the Glyph of Feint, which was basically considered a requirement in PvE); it wasn’t until this expansion that using it became a much more difficult decision to make in raids, making the opinion above feel even stranger.
Feint is, at present, a lose-lose scenario for raiding rogues in many situations. Either you chose to reduce your incoming damage for the benefit of your healers (and sacrifice DPS by doing so, thus making it take longer to kill the boss, which in turn means more time the healers have to spend healing), or you don’t (and increase the short-term pressure on your healers while dealing your normal amount of damage). If Kick, as a cheap defensive move with raid benefits, is deemed so low-cost as to be “effectively free” in PvP but is seen as too high-cost in PvE to warrant still having an energy cost, why can’t the same be said of Feint or Tricks?
GC re-posted that Kick, Skull Bash, Spear-Hand Strike are all going to be free in 5.2
Oh, I missed that — I see where he said it now. Thank you! I’ll update stuffies accordingly.
For Feint and Tricks, I think the reason is largely the benefits. Tricks can be a frequent damage boost when unglyphed (thinking more PvE here). Feint is a strong, no-cd damage reduction. With Elusiveness, this becomes even more true. You pay a resource cost for more potent effects, in lieu of a cooldown.
Interrupts, on the other hand are more ubiquitous because they’re more frequently used and need to be relatively cheap/free to maintain their functionality in certain settings.
You are certainly correct that with feint the cost comes in lieu of a cooldown but if given the choice I think most raiding rogues would choose cata feint (10 second CD, no cost) over the current feint.
–FD
I like the cd-less feint. Especially talented. It means that it is always available. I think most players obsess too much over dps. Its unique outside of tanks to have a cd-less damage reduction talent. Lets not forget that anytime there is massive aoe damage, a player should be asking “can I cheese this with a rogue?” Its one of those hidden benefits that few notice about the class and a great way to differentiate skill outside of dps.
I’m biased though, I hate cooldowns. Abilities should be limited by resource availability instead of cooldowns where ever possible. As it naturally changes the question a player is asking from “how to best chain/stack abilities” to “what do I want to do right now”. The gameplay goes from rote and efficient to dynamic and responsive.
We definitely obsess over DPS. How many convos have you and I been involved in where we try to talk people out of murdering each other over whether reforging into crit or haste will be a greater DPS gain? (Even the whole “AMR or ShadowCraft” discussion is silly from a macro point of view; it’s unlikely anyone would notice a DPS difference from fight to fight from using one reforger over the other.)
But we’re talking about cultural entrenchment here. Rogues are pure DPS; they are designed, in a PvE environment, to deal damage. The player culture is heavily centered around that idea, particularly in raiding. Even in PvP, I don’t think we’re so far removed from the “glass cannon” era that those old norms aren’t still deeply engrained. (The way-too-frequently-quoted WoW class/spec descriptions don’t help much in this regard, either; they very much focus on our death-dealing capability.) That’s going to result in a perpetual, and I’d argue unpleasant, tension whenever a PvE rogue has to choose between their utility and their ability to deal damage — which is in itself a form of utility, since it speeds up raid kills.
And this gets at one of my key issues with Feint: In a raid environment, it’s really not even the rogues choice as to whether Feint should be used; it’s the raid leader’s. If your healers are struggling with massive AoE damage phases, you may be asked to use Feint. If not (or if the raid leader doesn’t think about or fully realize the extent to which Feint can mitigate incoming damage, which I suspect happens often), you won’t. That doesn’t make it a particularly fun or interesting decision for the rogue, imo.
It’d be different if we had a fight like H-Valiona where the rogue’s ability to mitigate damage is key to the success of the fight. But in that case, you’d have a class imbalance issue due to the rogue being preferable.
I’m not saying I precisely have a solution here. If Feint were free, we’d feel like we had to use it all the time, and that’d be no fun either. I just can’t (despite Dalmasca’s comment above) connect with the logic behind why Kick “deserves” to be free but other low-cost rogue utility abilities don’t.
This is going to be very long because you have raised a number of complex issues. I apologize in advance.
Feint: Heres the big problem with feint in its current incarnation, it is almost always the wrong decision. This sounds like heresy I know, for a very long time players have been conditioned with truisms like “dead dps do no damage” and emphasized the importance of saving healer mana but in reality for an intelligent player maximizing dps is far more important. This doesn’t mean standing in fire or meter padding or ignoring your job, the caveat about an intelligent player exists for that reason, but in most circumstances maximizing dps is the MOST relevant consideration. Of course this doesn’t mean the truism above isn’t true, dead dps do in fact do no damage so if the choice is between survival and not using a personal cd, even at the cost of dps, using a personal cd is optimal.
If we in theory possessed precognition or at least the ability to mentally calculate the damage we are likely to take in an upcoming burst given all the relevant variables then we could use feint, or any other defensive cd that costs damage correctly. Since we don’t we over use feint, we use feint when we think we might die but actually were never in danger of it. This is technically a waste of damage, and technically detrimental to our raid’s success.
This is why the current incarnation of feint is uninteresting (and elusiveness is a waste of a talent point vs. cheat death or leeching poison), its an ability that we really should never use, the cost benefit analysis is almost always on the side of not using. By contrast cata feint was a much more interesting beast, it was an ability you should pretty much always (AR GCD capping situations excepted) use and more importantly you had to carefully select when you used it. Its cost was that you wouldn’t have it in the future, the cost benefit analysis is much more interesting and scales with skill much better.
To see this argument phrased differently check out Aldriana’s blog on feint from the MoP beta.
http://elitistjerks.com/blogs/10672-aldriana/567-mists_beta_thoughts_feint/
Resources: We need cooldowns because of specialization. This relates very nicely to the discussion above. Lets imagine two groups, a group of three rogues and a group of as rogue, a prot warrior and a disc priest, tackling some form of hard content which group is easier? The rogue group will have to carefully coordinate CDs, watch threat for an evasion rotation, lose dps from using stuns, recup, feint, perhaps even kite. Meanwhile in the trinity group the rogue can go full on dps, he doesn’t need to worry about mitigating non-lethal damage or healing himself because the healer can and will do it for him. Why is the second group so much more efficient? Specialization.
As the groups get larger and larger we can afford even more specialization. Lets imagine the CD on PW:Barrier was removed and instead it cost a ton of mana so it wasn’t really usable any more commonly than it is now if the priest is actively healing. If this happened its quite likely that groups would just tell that priest not to heal, instead they’d just use PW:B, now the raid has a large raid CD available more often and other healers (assuming similar charges were made to other healer raid cds) can more aggressively use their mana since they no longer have raid cds constraining their mana expenditures. Without cooldowns players are much freer to do things like this, to subdivide roles even further to make that role even more efficient. Obviously this is an extreme example but the logic applies to the general question of removing cooldowns and using a resource cost instead.
–FD